The sounds of tavern patrons chatting about the various goings on within Demini slowly began to fill Faonari’s ears. Political rumblings and complaints about guards. A faint tune on a lute swelled, and she opened her eyes to the sight of a familiar muddy red and brown colored building. 

“Welcome back! Mystery solved, eh? You did say it was bullshit, and it turns out it was fuckin’ bullshit?”

“Truey..? What’s going on?”

Faonari was thoroughly confused. She was right there, in the middle of the forest, learning about the curse afflicting her. Now she was back in the Russet Dove with Truey, who was serving her up a meliscotch and flatbread. 

“Ah. Yeah, that checks out. You weren’t here a moment ago, and then you shunted in. It did seem a tad advanced from a magical perspective, but who am I to say. Maybe if you got amber to burn like that you should pay your tab.”

Fao took a sip of her drink and frowned. Everything about this was off. The memories were fuzzy around the edges and unpleasant to think about. Shunting to anything but a town plaza’s dedicated warp circle was a long ways off from her level of magical prowess. 

“How long has it been since I left here? Since I got that letter?”

“A decent bit? Don’t you worry love, like I said, you haven’t been here drinking the whole time!” His grin turned down a touch. “I uh. I reckon something fishy happened. I’ve got a theorem y’see.”

“A… theorem?”

The barkeep finished serving a wealthy looking patron with salt and pepper hair and came to sit down across from Faonari. The chair creaked as he leaned forward, conspiratorially.

“A theorem. You opened your letter up, right? Got hit with a confusion sigil embedded in the paper, and then whoever messed with you finished up and sent you back. Check ya bags, bet whoever sent it stole something, and that was why.” Truey gave the adventurer a confident nod, then stole a sip from her glass.

The elf massaged her temples, trying to reassemble what had happened.

“You don’t understand though, I met someone. A fairie in the woods. The letter from earlier sent me to the library. Then, a book led me down a path, and that led to a spring. She was waiting there, and she told me things.”

Faonari thought back to that place, the waterfall that fell from an endlessly decanting jug, and the more she ruminated, the more Aurelia’s wicked grin lingered in her mind. The way she pulled her pink hair back with those long fingers. How she’d made the adventurer sit on her lap like a pet. 

Truey seemed skeptical to say the least. “She told you… things. Uh huh. These aren’t incompatible theories, mate.”

The magnitude of her peculiar circumstances hit Faonari fully. What the fuck had happened?!

“It was so real, Truey! It was so real. She wasn’t the result of some confusion spell put on by a raider. The fairie, Aurelia, she said I was under a curse. I get that this could be a memory confusion thing, but couldn’t it maybe be a curse too?”

Her friend’s ashen blue face wrinkled. “Eh, I’m just a barkeep... But I did take my clericals. Maybe I could check to see if you have anything obvious going on?” 

Faonari felt some semblance of relief at the suggestion. She wasn’t sure yet if she trusted the enigmatic fae within the Bitter Feld, but she had no reason to question her friend's motive. Any information was good information.

“Cheers, yes. I would do it myself, but my skills are more focused on taking down monsters and sneaking around than diagnosing curses.”

“Of course. Just make sure you tell anyone needing lodgings who pours the best meliscotch in town.”

He set his thumbs on her forehead and murmured an ember of spellcraft under his breath. A rush of golden wind rippled across her body, and she shivered. 

“Hmm… there’s definitely something. I’m certain of it. You’re unquestionably under the influence of arcana. But it’s too strong for me to have a real needle on it. This could be a curse like your new lady said, or it could be a charm.”

“She’s not my lady.” Fao sighed, and finished off her glass. “Great, So we’ve learned nothing.”

Truey got back up, and began collecting glasses from the various tables around the tavern. “Well I wouldn’t say that. We’ve learned that it’s real. We just don’t know what it is.”

Fao pondered her options for a moment. “Okay. Well this isn’t perfect, but it’s something. I could go back to the spring. If there’s a fairie there, then at least we know it wasn’t a thievery confusion scam. A swindler would definitely be long gone by now.”

There was of course the other side of the coin. That small voice inside her that was hopeful Aurelia might be waiting for her. The tiny glimmer of possibility that it would be her who held the answers to the strange happenings.

“I mean sure but like, check your bag too. That’s a good first step and a fair score easier than walking through the woods. And be safe, okay? If there is a fairie, well… Fae spirits can be dangerous.”

It was a fair point, and one that Fao couldn’t dispute. The adventurer finished her drink and set her haversack down on the table. She enhanced her vision with a few whispered words of arcana, and rummaged through the contents. 

Everything seemed to be in place. In honesty, she didn’t have all that much on her beyond the practical necessities and some relics from her travels. Her touch lingered on the letter, and the trees it was made from. 

“Nothing missing. Not a single coin.”

“Good, because you still owe me!”

She settled up at the bar, and put everything back where it belonged. Cinching the haversack onto her back, she let the door swing open as she stepped outside.

“Can you spare anything?”

Faonari was already lost in thought when the voice caught her attention. Pivoting back, she saw a young girl hunched on the ground beneath the shadow of the dragon fountain, a symbol that stood in the center of the town hub.

The flatbread in her hand was warm and untouched. Back in Kahrabar she had been fortunate enough to live with both parents and avoid the scourge of inequality. Things were better out here on the eastern coast, but far from perfect. That she had even been in a position to go on adventures instead of toiling was a privilege of sorts.

“Here, you have this. Stay safe kid.” She gave the child her bread, a wrap filled with seasoned eggs, and a flask of water.

And then she was off. Up the valley walls, past the city administrator’s mansion. Fanonari made short work of the forest, navigating it twice as fast as last time on the heels of her own muscle memory.

Until finally, she emerged once more into the spring clearing. Any worry she had imagined it was banished immediately by the sight of the tall woman waiting for her.

Aurelia put her hands on her knees and gently stood up. She had been resting on her perch by the surface of the water, feet dipped below the surface. She wore a wide, relieved smile.

“Oh thank goodness, there you are. I was so worried about where you had gotten off to!”

A large hand was already around Faonari’s shoulder, and she was being led back into the grove as if this was a return to normality. 

“Phew! You’re still here. That’s a good sign.”

“Why of course I’m here, sweetling. Worried to be all alone in the woods?~”

Faonari huffed, and shrugged off the arm, instantly remembering Aurelia’s more tediously flirtatious qualities.

“Can we please focus on the issue at hand? I need to think.”

Aurelia yawned, and settled back onto her moss covered stone. “Just because we’re problem solving doesn’t mean we can’t be friendly at the same time!”

Sitting down next to her, Fao reflected on the words that Aurelia had said to her before the shunt sent her hurtling back to Demini. 

“Now, you were telling me about a curse. One with another world?”

“The Otherworld, yes. Not a real place, but an illusory plane. A dark timeline without magic or mercy. The last time you went there, you fell unconscious. Do you mean to tell me that you returned there?”

The adventurer closed her eyes and thought back, trying to place herself in that moment before things shifted and turned. She was here, in the spring. The water flowed. The air was sweet like spun sugar and fruits. It was almost right. If she could just feel the way that she had when Aurelia played with her hair. 

“Aurelia, this sounds silly, and I’m a touch embarrassed to ask, but. I’m trying to replicate exactly how I felt when the shunt happened. I want to try and bring those memories back, to see if there’s anything I can learn.”

The fairie giggled in a way that was a little too sharp and a touch too flat at the same time.

“Say no more, precious! I certainly wouldn’t mind at all. You seem like you could use a bit of affection after such a troubling experience!”

She was pulled back into the fairie’s lap, against hot skin that she could feel through her gear. Long fingers worked their way through her hair.

“I don’t- it’s not like that.” The elf huffed under the coddling, but she had brought it upon herself. No point in complaining. She closed her eyes and focused as much as possible, placing herself back in the moment.

She was here, in the spring. But there was something else, faintly. She was… trussed up in a sling, tangled in unfamiliar materials in the center of a small dark room. What’s worse, she was inhabiting a completely different body. It felt so wrong, so intrusive. Like some dungeon trap. It was terribly unpleasant. 

“Shh, shh, it’s okay, you’re doing so well.” She must’ve made some dissatisfied noise, because Aurelia was doubling down on the reassuring touches.

Meanwhile, in the recesses of her mind, Fao found memories, bent like a blanket of itchy, uncarded wool. The sequence of events that happened in the Otherworld were grey and nonspecific, and scratchy to experience. She was allergic to her own recollections, soured by her own mind. 

Faonari wanted to stop and forget it all. She wanted to put it behind her. But she needed to understand the affliction, in whatever shape it took. There were unkind humans who made her toil for hours, it seemed. The motion of a lone sun loosely aligned with the normal passage of time here too. This wasn’t instantaneous. 

There was nothing good to be found there beyond fleeting words reflected in a glowing slate that she kept in her apron pocket. Small incremental exertions of suffering were the primary motive of the Otherworld, she concluded. Labor without arcana or passion to sustain her. A body that hurt all over with no access to healing herbs, and that was it. No joys but the dark brews she drank between customers. And then she was making a long journey back to the small building. Was this a tenth layer of the hells yet unknown?

She remembered now, how not so long ago, the her who was nothing but a hollow heart picked up a shiny polished headset. The miserable girl that she wasn’t, who had hopes of finding her way back to the world of Reverie. Faonari remembered her priming herself with a tincture and falling back into the real world.

She remembered brief glimpses of a spirit’s vision that told her sagely wisdom on her status. And then she was herself. 

But there was something else too, an oilslick rainbow shimmer that coated it all. The shimmer shone all around her right as she disappeared from the spring, and it glittered just as she arrived in the tavern. The same ethereal substance had dripped on her when she first arrived in Demini, at the very moment she now knew was an inflection point of the realitycurse.

Breathlessly, the girl recounted her experiences to Aurelia.

“I was here with you, and then for me it was like, suddenly I was hit with this wave of derealization. I thought everything was fake, and in the Otherworld I took off an eye covering and you suddenly didn’t seem real. And I was this frumpy sad human for a while.”

Aurelia looked genuinely heartbroken for a moment. Then, with clear intent and resolve, she shifted Faonari out from her lap and stood up. The air was already slightly cooler than before, so she let her feet dangle closer to the warm water. 

The fairie circled the spring, nimble hands picking flowers from the various bushes and blossoms as she measured a response. A bouquet acquired, the fairie started to stitch the blooms together. Her green eyes sharply focused on the task, while the rest of her energy remained firmly on the girl.

“I’m so sorry you had to experience that. It is exactly how a realitycurse works. Quintessential. Derealization, dissociation, and demoralization. What actually happened was this. You were sitting on my lap, and I gradually adjusted your perception using an enhanced awareness enchantment. You noticed the symptoms of this awful curse. But it was too much too fast. A mistake on my part. The curse lashed out, covering you in a shroud of corruption. And then it shunted you away from my grasp. Teleportation back to a place of familiar comfort, I suspect? A rare but not unheard of complication...”

“I don’t understand.” Faonari frowned. “Doesn’t the curse want me doubting my reality? I didn’t doubt it before I met you. And now it’s, what, fighting against you?”

Aurelia pulled a thin branch off of a nearby tree, twisting and turning the soft green wood.

“This must be so confusing. I’m sorry, little adventurer. Perhaps it would be helpful to think about this through the lens of a more conventional malady. The many diseases that druids treat, for example. A healer must identify a sickness before she can cure it! Sometimes, a particularly clever druid will use an alchemical elixir that discovers a disease before it even starts showing symptoms. Does that make sense, sweetling?” 

She ran the string of flowers around the wooden support, weaving them into a secure position. Fao wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

“I suppose so… How does that apply to the curse?”

“Wonderful question! Very good. A really smart disease might try to evade detection for as long as possible, so it can really wreak havoc before it gets cured. A curse is smarter than a disease. Your curse was crafted by some miserable magician with intent to harm, no doubt. It doesn’t want to be cured. And unlike a simple illness, it doesn’t have to take it lying down. A realitycurse can fight back.”

“Great. Just great. So I’ve been carrying around this… realitycurse for goodness knows how long, and now you’ve poked the dragon and woken it up. I hope you know what you’re doing and how to fix this.”

“I have some theories…” 

The tall, charming, woman who had brought her here with a mystery and a letter, and kept her here with witty words and wicked grin, held out her long arms. Resting in her palms was a floral crown.

“…but first, I have a gift.”